LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI 



"At the new Church-yard in Westminster some thousands of 

 the better sort met them, who thought not fit to march through 

 the City. Many looked on this funeral as an affront to the Parlia- 

 ment and Army; others called them Levellers; but they took no 

 notice of any of them." 



Ten days afterwards the struggle -began in earnest. News came 

 that the troops at Banbury, Wantage, Salisbury, etc., had cast off 

 allegiance to Cromwell, and had raised the sea-green flag in favour 

 of the Levellers' principles. After a good deal of marching and counter- 

 marching by the Levellers and the Cromwellian praetorian troops, the 

 former were surprised at Burford in Oxfordshire, and a fight in the 

 streets of that town ended the chances of a second revolution. Early 

 in June the great merchants of the City of London, who had often 

 enough execrated Cromwell, and held tight the purse-strings in the 

 face of the financial requirements of the parliamentary army, celebrated 

 the overthrow of the Levellers by a splendid banquet given at Grocers' 

 Hall in honour of Cromwell and Fairfax, the saviours of sacred 

 property. 



The Virtuosi. 



Lastly, in this rapid survey of some aspects of the Seventeenth 

 century, we must give our attention to the scientific movement pro- 

 ceeding in quiet, apparently far removed from these excursions and 

 alarms, but destined to be of basic social and economic importance. 

 Out of all the events which make the seventeenth century one of the 

 cardinal periods in the history of science, perhaps the most important 

 was the grouping together of scientific workers of the time into 

 societies for the furtherance of experiment and observation.^ These 

 societies, of which the Royal Society in England was one of the 

 earliest, were generally under the close protection of some prince 

 or monarch. Such royal patronage, we may believe, was dictated 

 not so much by a purely disinterested passion for abstract truth, as by 

 a desire for that financial prosperity which the decay of anti-usury 

 doctrine, the urge of the rising middle class to industrial ventures, 

 and the far-ranging thought and new technology of the scientists 

 was combining to produce. 



The Royal Society began as a group of scientists meeting both in 



^ See Omstein, M., The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century 

 (Chicago, 1928). 



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